Tag Archives: trilingual

After MM complaining Chinese is useless, I also noticed another change — it has become harder for them to form complete sentences. Their listening comprehension is still good. I continue to speak mandarin to them. However, they have stopped wanting to speak on the phone with grand parents. I think we are long overdue for a visit to Taiwan and see the grand parents.

I just bought the tickets and announce our pending travel plans to the children. They are so excited! I reminded them that we are going to speak Mandarin to Yeh Yeh (grand pa) and Nai Nai (grand ma) the whole time, and we’d better start practicing. They all agreed. MM even asked if they gets to go to schools in Taiwan. mmm, that is not a bad idea. Unfortunately, we are only staying for two weeks. Maybe next time we will stay longer and send them to summer camp.

I hope with the immersion environment, it will renew my children’s interest with Chinese. I plan to take MM and AA to train stations and visit night markets. This way, hopefully, MM will see how useful Chinese characters are.

I purchased the tickets and announced our travel plan to the children.

This summer when we visited Germany, AA lost her stuffed whale on the way there. To cheer her up, Oma gave her a stuffed dog (or wolf, we are still debating, but AA decided he is a dog , so dog it is) AA was very happy that she got a new friend and prompted named him.

I asked her in Mandarin what his name, she responded in Mandarin “他的名字叫哈利 (His name is Hali)”. I told her that I was pleasantly surprised that she gave the dog a Chinese name. She corrected me, “He has two names, one in English, Harry, and one in Mandarin like everybody else.”

It is true that in our family we all have two names, Chinese and Angelo (we choose the names the work in both German and English). It is interesting to me that she applies that subtle knowledge to her toys. It is also very practical. This way, we don’t have to switch to English pronunciation mid way through our Mandarin sentences and vise versa.

My children, like many other multilingual children, don’t do party tricks, However, they do find it amusing to teach us the language that we don’t speak. My husband, a native German speaker, can barely speak ten words in Chinese. One day, our daughter AA thought of a fun game to play with papa. She started with her favorite animal (well, insect to be precise but she was four so we will let that one slide), ” Can you say butterfly in Deutsch?” “I can, schmetterling.” “can you say butterfly in Mandarin?” “no? it’s ok, I will teach you.” “ok? ready? say Hoo-Di-eh”

Papa was a good sport and repeated it, “hoo deh.” His pronunciation was a bit off. And then a funny phenomena happened. AA obviously had forgotten who has the authority in Mandarin-speaking and probably thought Papa was correcting her, so she copied his sound and say “hoo deh.” I watched this in silence and it went on for about ten times. Each time papa followed her thinking she is correcting him, and he got it a little bit off, and then AA copied papa thinking he is correcting her. Toward the end the two of them produced some sounds that didn’t resemble anything in any language.

Time for intervention, I stepped in and corrected them both. We were I forgot I was teaching papa!”

It is funny but also reminded me that what authoritative figures we parents are to our children. Children automaticaly looked up to us parents thinking we must know all the answers to the world of questions. From early on, my children understood that their parents have limitations, such as papa doesn’t know anything about Mandarin, and Mama can’t say much German. This makes it so much easier for us to have an honest discussion with our children and tell them that although we have more experience but we don’t kow everything much and we are still learning.

One day MM came home and reported that he has two “reading buddies.” MM’s elementary school has this wonderful system where the 3rd graders read to the kindergarteners, the 4th graders read to the first graders and so on. According to MM, his original reading buddy doesn’t speak English very well, so he has another 4th grad kid accompany him and they both read to MM. I asked MM, “If this kid is not good at English, he must be good at other languages. What language is he good at?” MM went “He is very smart in Spanish and he tought me some words.” MM later said, “Nai Nai (MM’s Taiwanese grandmother) is very smart in Chinese, even she can not speak English. Opa and Oma don’t speak English very well but they are very smart in Deutsche.” MM continued to list more people he knows. When he said that, I was very touched. I am not sure if this is a direct result of us raising him to be trilingual or the diverse community we live in. I’d like to believe that when children speak more than one languages, it will help them see the world from different perspectives. Maybe it will also help them to be more tolerant and open-minded.

One story I like to tell people about our son MM. When he was 3, he figured out that he speaks Chinese with Mama and German with Papa while Mama and Papa talk to each other in English. He also figured out that Mama and Papa don’t understand each other’s language much. One day, he asked me for a cookie in Chinese. I told him “no” in Chinese. He then went downstairs to my husband. One minute later, my husband asked, “Did you ask MM to get cookies from me?” Next thing I heard was the rapid footsteps of MM running away from the scene. We were laughing so hard. I thought for that little cleaver stunt, he almost deserve a cookie. Almost.

Ps. I just read the story to MM, and he remembered that well. and he told me that he was just trying his luck twice. and if he would try it again, he probably should have tried and asked for a cookie from me in German and hopefully, i might get so confused and say yes.

Our daughter AA reported one day afterschool that she had made new friend and told us that he is part Korean. We asked her what parts she has. She proudly said “Chinese and American.” Papa gentelly probed, “what else?” AA thought for a while, then said, “oh, and German.” Papa asked again, “are they equal parts?” “Oh, no, Chinese and American parts are much bigger, I only have a little bit of German,” said AA.

“Why? Why is German a small part? how do you know?” Papa asked.

“I know how to count to 100 in Chinese, but I can only count to ten in German. That’s how I know!”

Hello, welcome to the first blog entry of Raising Bilingual Children. I guess it is a tradition to answer a few questions in the inaugural blog: who am I and what this blog is about and why am I doing this, etc.

I am a chinese native from taiwan. I met my husband who is a German-native from Munich. We met in San Francisco many years ago. We have two wonderful children. We raised our children to speak Mandarine Chinese, German and English simply because both our families are still in Taiwan or Germany. We want to make sure that our children can communicate with their grand parents and relatives (so we don’t get in trouble from our parents) and understand their culture heritage.

We are very fortunate that we live in an area where there is much diversity and many children speaking more than English. I am hoping this blog will allow us to connect with other parents that are also trying to raise their children to be bi-lingual.

In this blog, I will cover topics such as:

My personal experience raising Bi-lingual/multi-lingual Children

Funny stories about our multi-lingual family lives

Share some of my search result on language materials, or language schools